Research firm Strategy Analytics has announced its smartphone market share numbers for Q3 2012. The numbers show that Samsung Galaxy S III overtook the Apple iPhone 4S to become the world's best selling smartphone for Q3.

Samsung shipped 18 million Galaxy S III smartphones during Q3 of 2012. The quantity of units shipped gave Samsung's smart phone 11% of the smartphone market globally. Strategy Analytics attributes the Galaxy S III's large touchscreen and extensive distribution around the world along with generous operator subsidies as the main reasons for the smartphones success.

Apple shipped 16.2 million iPhone 4S smartphones, giving it second place in the global smartphone market. Much of the reason that the iPhone slipped from the top spot was because consumers were holding off to purchase the anticipated iPhone 5 at the end of Q3. Apple shipped 6 million units of the iPhone 5 in Q3 of 2012 with very little time on market.

The total number of smartphones shipped in Q3 of 2012 added up to 167.8 million.

The Samsung Galaxy S III grew its market share significantly between Q2 of 2012 and Q3 growing from 3.5% to 10.7% of the global market. Comparatively, the iPhone 4S slipped from 12.7% of the market in Q2 of 2012 to 9.7%. The brand-new iPhone 5 grabbed 3.6% of the market.

However, the research firm expects the win for Samsung to be very short-lived. Strategy Analytics says that it expects the iPhone 5 to out ship the Galaxy S III in Q4 2012 allowing the iPhone to regain the title as the world's most popular smartphone.

The problem for Apple is that, if they want to remain on top, they have to find the next "cool" product and develop an innovative software to go with it. The Iphone / Ipad are simply getting boring. Not to the eye, as they are still fine looking devices. But as far as the OS goes, there is little innovation and it struggles to keep up with Android. Unfortunately for Apple, their latest decision as far as GPS and mapping goes, proved to be a major mistake, which will cost them.

When talking about hardware, Apple will have a hard time competing with companies like Samsung that focus their research and development on it. Apple focus is more oriented toward design, software and ecosystem build up. Soon or later, we can expect Android to be sold on superior products, like Google just did with the Nexus 10.

The decline that you are seing in their stock (AAPL) reflects the concern major investors have with Apple. And I believe it is justified.

Since the stock market is generally a projection of how a company will perform in the future, the main question is: will Apple come out with a revolutionary product?If they don't, there is a chance that history could repeat itself.

Another major problem that is seriously threatening Apple future is software development. Android is becoming exponentially more popular to the point that iOS might become irrelevant. Android can be found in a very wide variety of products, that ranges from smart phones, tv, tablets, pc, portable pc, pc-on-a-sticks to custom boards and integrated board system that can make use of affordable Chinese made (and designed!) electronic and an open OS. We are talking about a 5 to 1 ratio (Android versus iOS) today, which is soon to become a 8 to 1 or 9 to 1 ratio due to the booming of electronic start up in China (who only rely on Android). The impact, long term, will a much faster development of applications for Android. Which will ultimately force developers to abandon iOS (like it happened on the PC market).

As of today, there is no clear product news release from Apple that would hint that any such innovative product is in the wings. Until then, Apple will slowly decline, which might not be in the consumers best interest. An Android monopoly would not be any better than an iOS monopoly.

Nothing touches the iPhone 5 or iPad (very curious to see the 4th gen benchmarks) right now, not even close. Leapfrogging them in performance will also be difficult given that the A6 leapfrogged their own hardware that others are still playing catch-up with. The S3 also has an inferior display (unless you're blessed to not see the Pentile pattern and don't mind oversaturated color profiles) and about half the iPhone 5's battery life with LTE browsing.

Apple has been doing a great job with their hardware design, the fastest and best hardware without compromising size, weight, or battery life.

Yup, mad as hell. You can't bring facts into a discussion so you make posts like this as always. Why else wouldn't I think you're an angry little man?

Also, it just occurred to me that Android fans should be mad at Samsung for charging what they do for the S3. It is slower, cheaply made, with inferior displays, yet it costs about as much as an iPhone 5. It seems overpriced to me given all of its relative deficiencies, they should really drop its price down further. Maybe they charge more because its bigger, but that doesn't make sense since packing more power into a smaller package usually results in a higher price.

Ad hominem attacks against objective facts certainly says that you're mad. Why else would you jump on people to defend inferior things with no backup other than name-calling? You have nothing else to help yourself other than that.

If your facts were objective you would have mentioned the removable battery, the larger screen, the hi res screen, micro sd, NFC, and a far superior OS and all the other things the S3 has that the iPhone lacks.

it is good hardware although very undersized. But really the OS is just getting old. IOS6 should really be called IOS 3.4

The high res screen isn't much of an improvement when it is a pentile screen with fewer subpixels than a "lower" res display in an iPhone, thus resulting in visual artifacts and fuzzy looking text. Ditto goes for their poor color calibration, oversaturated, too much contrast, and inconsistent between phones. With the premium they charge you'd think that they could individually color calibrate those displays and get them to sRGB.

Removable batteries and SD cards are nice, but with those you add size. There is no way to get those features into something as small as an iPhone, and its the same reason why the Nexus 7 and Kindle don't have those either. My first generation Kindle had expandable battery and SD card expansion. You know what, taking them away and making the device smaller was well worth the trade, and the same applies here. They are just not valuable to me, making the device smaller is, but I understand if other people want to compromise size for physical expansion. I never carried spare batteries with my laptops or phones before all this, I went for products with the best battery life instead. Carrying around more crap isn't for me.

I think its a dead end feature in the long run since battery life and storage will continue to increase as size decreases. An iPhone also gets you double the LTE browsing time and almost double the wifi browsing time of an S3, so no need to carry around spare batteries in the first place.

As for the OS getting old, my main complaints are skeumorphism in certain apps (calendar, podcasts), but Ive taking over software UI should fix those very quickly. Otherwise it has a solid feature set and is by far the most efficient OS out there. Efficiency is one reason why it squeezes faster application performance with SoCs clocked 30% slower. Under the hood it is still a beast, so I'm fine with it. Being the #1 target development platform also helps with my decision.

Again, these are reasons why I currently use it. If larger screens or physical keyboards matter then I totally understand why you'd get another device, those are totally legit.